Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to last week

The Internet has begun to
route around the damage caused by the disruption of access to
my 1999-2002 BYTE.com columns. I really hope a better solution will
be forthcoming. When you are a writer whose entire corpus exists
online, woven into a fabric of citation and commentary, it is
incredibly painful to see that fabric torn apart. The
Wayback Machine is a terrific
resource. Serving as the canonical namespace for
formerly-free-but-now-restricted content is not, however, its best
and highest use. In any case, few users will avail themselves of
this option. Most, following Google-supplied links, will just
mutter "damn" and move on.

Discontinuity does have an upside. When I was unable to redirect my
RSS feed, I learned something interesting about my suscribership. A
third of it was robotic, and didn't give a damn that nothing new
seemed to have been posted for three months. It's useful to know
these things. But on the whole, you'd rather not be forced to learn
them the hard way.

I wrote a column for BYTE on the Wayback Machine when it first
appeared. Ironically, it was for a planned revival of the print
edition of BYTE -- which morphed into a PDF download, so the column
never did appear on the web with its own URL. The column speculated
that the Wayback Machine would become the resolver of last resort.
When Google returned a URL that was blocked or 404'd, the browser
would automagically redirect to a Wayback Machine URL. Funny how
things turn out.